Body-Coupled Communication (BCC) is an emerging near field communication technology that uses the human (or animal) body to propagate data by wireless communication over the body between devices that are on or in close proximity with the body. The BCC technology has several important characteristics that make it particularly suitable for a wide range of wearable consumer and medical devices. For example, it can address the needs that the current communication approaches struggle with: ease-of-use, privacy, security, high data rate with high energy efficiency.
For example U.S. Pat. No. 8,407,279 describes a method for providing a social network service using human body communication including sensing a human body contact; transmitting or receiving data through a human body communication; storing at least one of social data, user data, reference data, and additional data collected; identifying a contact object using the data received via the human body communication; and analysing a pattern of contact with the contact object using at the stored data.
US2012/023169 describes information exchanges between individuals using body-coupled communications. The communications are between mobile devices carried by the individuals and are at a local level.
US2004/152440 describes passing a pointer to data held on the internet. It describes passing an email address via body-coupled communications which is then used by the receiving device to send a link with the data to the sending device. Thus there is a unidirectional passing of data to one device, the data having been selected by one user on their device.
WO2014/095947 (D3) and U.S. Pat. No. 5,796,827 (D4) disclose various communications using BCC but do not mention at all the case of two users or the passing any form of information between them.
Advantageously, body coupled communication allows an easy and intuitive way for sharing data between users. For example, body coupled communication involving multiple users can provide an easy way to come up with a single multimedia playlist for multiple persons, or compare and grant access to multiple data sets (e.g. medical data). However, unrestricted data sharing may raise security or privacy concerns. On the other hand, restricting data access may hinder easy and intuitive sharing of relevant data made possible by the body coupled communication.
Accordingly there is a desire to improve control over data sharing using body coupled communication.